The morality in Ken Kesey’s counterculture novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest juxtaposes the novel’s setting. Themes of healing and moral clarity are adversely contradicted by the rigidness of society and its pressure on outsiders. Chief Bromden is the protagonist of the novel, and his freedom and clarity, given to him by nature, are destroyed by the industrialization of society and the mechanical hospital. Chief’s suffering and deterioration are representative of the actual effects of conformity, which was heavily enforced in the era of the Cold War when this novel was written and still linger today.
Chief’s childhood spent in the wilderness and his forced removal from his homeland influence him to develop a distrust in society. As a Native …show more content…
The hospital is very pristine; it is always clean and blindingly white. The patients are treated as products, “[n]ot in the hospital, these, to get fixed, but just to keep them from walking around the streets giving the product a bad name” (Kesey 14). The hospital is consistently referred to as a machine, with “white tubes in the ceiling…to pump their refrigerated light” (Kesey 149) to keep the patients from expressing themselves. By being the production center of the Combine, the hospital can mass produce more people into artificial beings; even inside of the hospital, many patients are stripped of their humanity by the use of frontal lobotomy and electroshock therapy to transfigure them into mental vegetables, which the hospital considers a success. The removal of nature from a hospital contradicts the entire purpose of a hospital; people cannot heal in artificiality.
Kesey’s novel serves as a revelation for Americans not only about the horrors of mental hospitals but also as a self-analysis for how society treats humanity. Nature is removed from the patients of the hospital; they cannot heal, even in a physical location away from society, by suffering in a machine. By subjecting humanity to a strict, McCarthy-esque regime, we are slowing down or ultimately eliminating moral growth while revering material growth. Humanity is not meant to go through a Xerox machine; as seen by McMurphy, there will always be outliers to break the
Chief’s childhood spent in the wilderness and his forced removal from his homeland influence him to develop a distrust in society. As a Native …show more content…
The hospital is very pristine; it is always clean and blindingly white. The patients are treated as products, “[n]ot in the hospital, these, to get fixed, but just to keep them from walking around the streets giving the product a bad name” (Kesey 14). The hospital is consistently referred to as a machine, with “white tubes in the ceiling…to pump their refrigerated light” (Kesey 149) to keep the patients from expressing themselves. By being the production center of the Combine, the hospital can mass produce more people into artificial beings; even inside of the hospital, many patients are stripped of their humanity by the use of frontal lobotomy and electroshock therapy to transfigure them into mental vegetables, which the hospital considers a success. The removal of nature from a hospital contradicts the entire purpose of a hospital; people cannot heal in artificiality.
Kesey’s novel serves as a revelation for Americans not only about the horrors of mental hospitals but also as a self-analysis for how society treats humanity. Nature is removed from the patients of the hospital; they cannot heal, even in a physical location away from society, by suffering in a machine. By subjecting humanity to a strict, McCarthy-esque regime, we are slowing down or ultimately eliminating moral growth while revering material growth. Humanity is not meant to go through a Xerox machine; as seen by McMurphy, there will always be outliers to break the